IR detector arrays are described in (1) U.S. Pat. No. 4,080,532, Hopper, March 1978; (2) U.S. Pat. No. 4,745,278, Hanson, May 1988; (3) U.S. Pat. No. 4,792,681, Hanson, December 1988; and (4) "LOW-COST UNCOOLED FOCAL PLANE ARRAY TECHNOLOGY", by Hanson, Beratan, Owen and Sweetser; presented Aug. 17, 1993 at the IRIS Detector Specialty Review. Various manufacturing and fabrication techniques for several different IR sensing array systems are described in these references.
The physical requirements of uncooled IR arrays and a brief description of current fabrication processes will be presented to aid in the understanding of the improvements realized by the novel methods to be described.
A line scanner may contain from several hundred to a few thousand individual picture elements (pixels); an area imager may contain several thousand to tens of thousand individual pixels. Each of these pixels typically consists of a capacitor (or resistor or another type of electronic element) that has a heat sensitive dielectric, i.e., sensitivity to IR intensity. Making use of the fact that the charge stored by a capacitor is proportional to the product of its terminal voltage and its capacitance, electronic circuitry can be attached to the two terminals of the pixel capacitor to measure the intensity of the IR impinging on a specific pixel. Obstructions in the imaging field are removed and the electrical connections to these capacitors are simplified if one of the capacitor terminals is made common to all. Hundreds to tens of thousands of electrical connections must still be accomplished between the other isolated terminals of the pixel capacitors and the electronic sensing circuitry. In addition, the pixel capacitors must be thermally isolated from each other, even while having one terminal connected to all the other common terminals.
The common side of the pixels is referred to as the optical coating and generally must (1) efficiently absorb IR energy at the desired wavelengths. (2) provide a continuous electrical path to supply a bias voltage to all pixels and (3) attach to or form an electrode for each of the pixel capacitors. The optical coating is typically a composite of a plurality of thin films having the desired physical properties, such as IR absorbability, electrical conductivity, thermal isolation, etc. The optical coating side of the device will be referred to as the frontside, and the opposite side will be referred to as the backside.
The thicker heat sensitive dielectric forms the array substrate and is typically a pyroelectric or ferroelectric ceramic material such as barium-strontium-titanate (BST).